Student question: What about all the bad things we could have as a result of your work?

I think it does leave ethical dilemmas, because we’ve got new technology here that could potentially help people. That we have paralysed people that could be doing a lot more but we need to develop the technology. That’s positive but then on the other hand we’ve developed the technology and as you say opened up the possibility of cyborg armies, remote controlling humans, software viruses that become biological viruses, all sorts of, of nasties. Ah, we get good things and bad things and then there’s the thing in the middle. The upgrading humans, giving humans extra abilities, that is sort of not, neither good or bad, but it, it’s in the middle. It’s something a bit different. It’s something strange. I think we’ve just got to push forward. We’ve got to hope, as with any new technology. With any new technology it can get used for good, for bad. Nuclear energy, nuclear weapons was a wonderful example of that, um, and we’ve just got to hope that we can push forward in a positive way and that the positives outweigh the negatives. Certainly as a scientist I feel my duty is to actually look at the possibilities and report and be open about it and not try and do it behind closed doors, um, but then it’s up to society to discuss and if, if society said no, we don’t think this is right this is too dangerous, okay so be it. I just have to look at that.